More Beauty at the Taj, in Human Form and in Stone

To give you some idea of scale:

And now, some close-ups of the artistry:

The Majestic Taj Mahal

Approaching the East Gate, our guide on the left in the Dodge Ram jacket, Crissan on the right.

There it is! We get a glimpse over the wall . . .

It comes shimmering into view through the stone arch of the inner gate.

We are really there, in the early morning light, bedazzled.

Tomb of Akbar

 This is the tomb of Akbar, Third Mughal Emperor, built in the 1600's just on the outskirts of Agra. Akbar. Check out Wikipedia's page for a short description and much better pictures!  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_Akbar_the_Great

This is the Inner Gate, at the very center of the huge grounds, containing the tomb.

Parrots flutter in the trees

and antelope roam inside the walls.

The two of us at the doorway to the inner sanctum...

The Inner Chamber of the Tomb of Akbar is an echo chamber. The man at the left sang out Allahu Akbar in a strong, melodious voice, and his echoes harmonized with the notes he sang, an awesome thing to hear.

The Road to Agra

We left Delhi for Agra on Friday, February 11, at about mid-day, going by car, with driver provided; very thankfully, since the traffic seems utterly chaotic to the untrained eye. Eventually you begin to pick up an underlying pattern, and see that there is some sense of order that allows for progress to be made with minimal damage to vehicles and pedestrians.  At this point, however, I wasn’t feeling the order at all, in any part of my surroundings or myself. I was feeling mentally and emotionally much the same way I had been feeling physically just a couple of days earlier, i.e., that it would bring disastrous results to try to digest even a morsel of input from this strange and foreign environment I found myself in. In short, I was overwhelmed. I was stuffed to the brim with the constant onslaught of unfamiliar sights, sounds, smells and sensations of India.

Now, you may have noticed that there is an inverse relationship between the novelty of our surroundings and experiences and the passage of time, so that in a familiar and customary world, time seems to fly by faster every year; by virtue of longevity, each year is less novel and takes less effort to process, or so it seems to me, and therefore, there is less to take note of, and it all goes by in a blur of ever-increasing speed. During the past week and a few days, and especially in the first 4 days after arriving in India, time slowed to a c – r - - a - - - w - - - - l. It was tremendously disorienting. I felt that I hardly knew which way was up.

Naturally, my response was to shut down. I enveloped myself in a fog, behind dark glasses, with noise-reducing headphones dampening the incessant horn-blowing on the highways, and tried to ignore my surroundings for a while. On the road to Agra, that turned out to be impossible; my curiosity kept getting piqued by some flash of color or an unusual face, or a camel pulling a massively overstuffed cart, or cows of every size and shape wandering across the road or plumping themselves down in the median, and so on and so on. The very thing I was trying to manage was managing my attention for me. It was out of my control. I gave up and took more pictures, but even then, the speed of our progress on the road prevented me from fully taking in, never mind actually taking, many of shots I tried for, as I have mentioned already.

But, here are a few more from that area between Delhi and Agra, and next I will tell you about the great tombs of Agra, the tomb of Akbar and the Taj Mahal.

Note the drivers perched at the front of the cart.

Cows parked out front.

Sugar cane in the truck toward rear, produce stands, a small town scene.

Artfully stacked cauliflower

Lumberyard - basically, trees and branches used as-is for building, while a passerby chats on his mobile.

A woman does her own hauling

 

 

 

 

No hands needed

 Sharing the road with one and all . . .

One or the other will move over after sufficient horn use. 

so much color  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peaceful fields of green